The True Account (15 page)

Though my uncle had learned much of the Hidatsa language during the three days and nights that we had been kept captive in this strange circus caravan, he had not been able to discover what our captors intended to do with us. But as we approached the great Indian city on the bluffs above the Missouri, with the returning raiders shouting and singing, and people running out to see the spoils and wonders brought back from the mountains, he said, “Well, Ti, the little inconvenience of our temporary imprisonment notwithstanding, we have beaten Captain Lewis's party to the Mandans. Now, let us see who spies their city first. We will make a little game of it to pass the time, knowing that we have won the first half of the race with Lewis hands down.”

“I offer you my greatest felicitations, sir,” I said through rattling teeth. “But isn't our victory in the race rather like that of King Pyrrhus? Who, as you taught me when I was very young, defeated the Roman legions but suffered such heavy losses that his triumph was in name only?”

“Lewis will ransom us when he arrives, Ti. I have no doubt of that. It would look mean and low of him not to, you know, after losing the first half of the race to us. I acknowledge that being dragged into the city in a cottonwood-pole cage is not exactly the arrival I had in mind. But set your mind at rest. Even if we are not ransomed, I have a proposal to place before Blue Moon that will win our freedom and ensure the kindest reception for us with both the Hidatsas and Mandans for the entire winter. Aha! There's the city ahead. I spied it first. You must get up early in the morning to steal a day's march on me.”

“Uncle, you seem to relish our situation.”

“Say what you will, Ti, it is an interesting way to travel through the countryside.”

The trade fair of the Mandans was held on a plain adjacent to the principal town of the metropolis. Here on the prairie overlooking the river, several thousand Indians had gathered for the annual fall market of the upper Missouri. As we were hauled into the center of the fairgrounds along with the catamount, the goat, the sheep, and the other captives, Indians from many tribes pointed and laughed at us. “Sit tight, Ti,” my uncle said, as if I had a choice. “Soon we'll be as free as the birds of the air.

“Hail to Private True Teague Kinneson,” he roared out at the top of his lungs. “The winner of the first half of the great race to the Pacific greets you.”

The people, both the Mandans and their guests, crowded around the cage, and poked and prodded us in the most familiar manner. Some of the warriors fingered my long, light-colored hair and commented to each other in a very unsettling manner. Others seemed to be trying to purchase us.

“Blue Moon,” cried my uncle in Hidatsa, or something approximating it. “This is a very shabby way to treat an American soldier who stood at the side of Ethan Allen at the fall of Fort Ticonderoga. I will fight fifty of your greatest warriors, including you and your bear, for our freedom.”

“Do you know that with a single swipe this bear of mine can break the neck of a full-grown charging buffalo?” Blue Moon inquired.

“No doubt,” said my uncle. “But without wounding you or the good bear or your fifty warriors with arrow, bullet, or blade and without doing lasting harm to any of you, I can rout you all from the field of battle.”

At this bold declaration, Blue Moon laughed heartily. Then he spoke to his bear, which also appeared to laugh, as did his war eagle. Nonetheless, the Hidatsa chief could not turn down my uncle's challenge, which had been made very publicly; and the battle was scheduled to take place the following morning at sunrise on the Mandans' ball-playing field adjacent to the fairgrounds. In the meantime, my uncle asked that we be released from the cage on our word of honor that we would not try to escape. His request was granted, and he immediately began to prepare for the next day's engagement.

From a Mandan woman he bought a bison bladder as large as my mother's five-gallon beanpot and a square of buffalo hide with the hair still attached. Along the river he collected some tall bulrushes, and nearby he cut six cottonwood saplings two to three inches in diameter. From a Cheyenne trader he purchased a tanned antelope skin as tough as leather.

The Indians showed great interest in my uncle, with his gleaming copper head plate and chain mail and tall boots and courtly mannerisms. He bowed chivalrously to all the women and offered his hand in a forthright manly fashion to the warriors (who mimicked his gestures exactly, to much laughter), and entertained the children in a hundred little amusing ways, now quacking like a duck, now strutting like a tom-turkey in his belled stocking cap. Everyone was curious about his invention-in-progress, which looked like a featherless dead goose with several headless necks. When I inquired what it might be, he bade me wait and see—he believed I would be as surprised as the Indians by his ingenuity.

 

At dawn the next morning, at one end of the ball-playing field, my uncle positioned himself on Ethan Allen like a knight of yore preparing to enter the lists. Just at sunrise, with his invention in his arms, he commenced down the field at a slow and stately pace. At the opposite end, Blue Moon, on his warhorse, proceeded toward him at a walk, accompanied by fifty warriors on one flank and the grizzled bear on the other, with the eagle hovering about a hundred feet overhead, its white plumage sparkling in the sunrise. I attended on Bucephalus a few paces behind True, more terrified than I had ever been in my life, even during our encounters with the murderous Harpe brothers and the war party of the Teton Sioux.

Blue Moon nocked an arrow. “That good chokecherry shaft has my name on it, Ti,” my uncle observed. “But never fear. We will live to use it as a toothpick. See the troops arrayed against us like the Persian cavalry facing Alexander!”

With this encouraging observation, he affixed the large end of his tin ear trumpet to his invention, raised the small end of the trumpet to his lips, and gave a long blast, at the same time compressing the buffalo bladder with a powerful squeeze and filling the prairie for miles around with the most hideous screeching squeal ever produced by the breath of mortal man. Rising in crescendo to an unbearable pitch, the screeling echoed and re-echoed off the sides of the slopes above the field, the waves of sound emanating outward met by the waves bouncing back, creating an unbearable field of pure horrible NOISE. Blue Moon and his men and all of the spectators dropped whatever they were holding and clasped their hands over their ears, so that the entire assemblage of Indians looked like my poor father, replicated a thousand times.

I had earlier, at my uncle's insistence, stuffed my own ears, and those of Bucephalus, with soft dried grass, after the fashion of Odysseus's men stopping their ears with wool so that only he would hear the Sirens' seductive strains. Even so, Bucephalus reared. The charging bear whirled twice, like a dog chasing its tail, and shot off toward the river. The eagle pulled out of its dive and veered away. But my uncle, on his deaf mule, continued into the very teeth of his enemies, blowing and squeezing and squeezing and blowing upon his homemade bagpipe for all he was worth.

To his credit, Blue Moon stood his ground—expecting, he later told us, to be swooped away at any moment by the thousand invisible shrieking banshees loosed by the pipes. But as the knight-errant drew near the stricken chief, in a gesture of magnanimity that he later said would no doubt be talked of on the upper Missouri for centuries to come, he left off his dreadful medley and, lifting over his head the rush strap by which the bagpipe hung from his neck, presented the instrument to his adversary. “Compliments of Private True Teague Kinneson, sir,” he told the deafened chief. “Expeditionary, playwright, lexicographer, and piper through and through.” The field was silent for a moment. Then, at this unprecedented act of graciousness, wave upon wave of roaring applause went up from the spectators, equally honoring the great Blue Moon and my uncle.

 

Later that day, the victorious piper instructed me to paint, in large red letters on a tanned buffalo hide, the message “Welcome to the Lewis and Clark Expedition from Private True Teague Kinneson, First to Reach the City of the Mandans, October 1804.” But just as we finished hanging this rather boastful banner between the upper branches of two soaring cottonwoods on a bluff overlooking the Missouri, where the explorers would be sure to see it as they approached the community, an emissary from the Indian village came running with a most unexpected report. Blue Moon's war eagle, having apparently conceived a most violent romantic passion for the bagpipe, had swooped down upon his master and plucked the instrument out of his hands before the chief had any inkling of what was happening. The smitten bird of prey had carried it off to a treetop, and he refused to let anyone, even the astonished Blue Moon, come near, lest his new inamorata be disturbed on her nest.

“Ah,” said my uncle with his hand on his heart, “so great, Ti, is the power of love.” And he liked the sound of this sentiment so much that, this time with a tear in his eyes, he said again, “So great is the power of love.”

November 15, 1804

Charles and Helen Kinneson

Kingdom Common, Vermont, United States of America

 

Dear Father and Mother,

I write to you from the Mandan Indian villages some 1,800 miles, as the river winds, above St. Louis, to report that uncle and I are both in excellent health and progressing rapidly toward the Pacific Ocean. After an interval with the Teton Sioux, we forged ahead of the official expedition (with whom uncle supposes he is engaged in a race) and arrived here at the Mandans' well before them, in a manner I will describe to you in detail upon our return.

The Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, among whom we intend to spend the winter before resuming our journey in the spring, have been very little corrupted by outside influence, and their original society has remained almost perfectly intact. They dwell in a large metropolis—considerably larger than St. Louis or Washington—consisting of five villages strung out along the upper Missouri, each made up of several hundred circular earth lodges. The headman of one of these towns, Black Cat, has kindly invited uncle and me to stay with him and his family. Captain Lewis's expedition, when at last it arrived, built a fort upriver.

I miss you both very much, and also Vermont; yet each day here brings something new, and uncle says I am progressing as an artist by leaps and bounds and that “Louisiana is my Oxford and he my Scholia Aristotle.” I hope to post this letter, of which I will keep a copy, in the spring when Corporal Warfington will return to St. Louis in the expedition's big keelboat. Captain Lewis and Captain Clark, with the main party, will continue to the Rocky Mountains in their pirogues and canoes, and uncle and I by horse- and mule-back.

Though the captains and their soldiers seem to be very fine men, uncle refuses to hold much commerce with them because of his belief that he, not Lewis, should have been selected to lead the official expedition. Nor, frankly, do they seem to know quite what to make of us. Perhaps we will become better acquainted over the winter. I will try to write again before we leave, and much look forward to that happy time in a year, two at most, when you will once again see, in our beautiful Green Mountains, your taller, browner, stronger, but ever-faithful and loving son,

 

Ticonderoga

S
INCE OUR ARRIVAL
at the Mandans, I had painted many of the principal men of the tribe, including their two main chiefs, Big White and Black Cat. On the afternoon of Black Cat's sitting, I noticed, loitering near the door of my lodge, a tall, well-set-up, finely dressed young man, whose name in Indian sounded something like Fra-hank-a-line. I had seen Fra-hank-a-line rouging his face and associating with the Mandan womenfolk, and therefore supposed him to be one of the “exquisites” of the tribe—the Indians' designation for a species of dandy-men, who dwelt together in a lodge designed for their use alone, where they spent all day primping and preening and fixing their ground-length hair. But I had also noticed that, unlike his painted brethren, this gentleman carried a war lance and a bow four feet long and as white as ivory. Upon inquiring, I learned that in addition to being a warrior of renown, Fra-hank-a-line was also a famous Indian artist, whose stick figures painted on tepee covers, depicting the exploits of various chiefs and medicine men, were greatly in demand.

Finishing with the Cat, I invited Fra-hank-a-line into my painting room and began to sketch out his features. He stood for his portrait, the better to show off his hair, which was adorned with tufts of sweetgrass and bright feathers set at a swank angle, and so long that it swept the ground when he walked. I was quite delighted to have an opportunity to paint this tinseled fellow. He carried a fly-brush fashioned from a buffalo's tail, a fan of turkey feathers, and a medicine bag made of coyote skin, in which he kept all kinds of hoca-poca appurtenances—birds' feet, snakes' rattles, odd-shaped river stones, feathers, bear claws, and what have you—that the Indians believed protected them or gave them power.

Fra-hank-a-line, who was perhaps ten years my elder, had upon his painted face an expression of superior complacency and general satisfaction, as well as a knowing, amused gleam in his eyes, which were as blue as my own. He watched me paint for a while, then suddenly called out, in excellent English, “Come, sir. Have the goodness to swing your easel about and show me your efforts, that I may judge of their merits for myself.”

I nearly dropped my brush and palette. When I showed Fra-hank-a-line the portrait, he tilted his head, closed one eye, and said in the assured manner of a seasoned man of the art world, “You could benefit from a few months with our great Indian painters, Ticonderoga. While I don't presume to detract from the energy of your work, it has no sense of telling a story or preserving history. Which, after all, is the
raison d'être
for all painting.”